Careers@Skytap Videos: When Hiring, Never Overlook the Passion

As you might know by looking at news of our recent funding round, and Skytap bringing in Jill Domanico as VP of Talent, hiring the right people is absolutely essential to our growth plans. Since we’re surrounded by cutting-edge cloud companies here in Seattle looking to grow as well, good talent is in high demand.

Hiring is not just a task we can leave up to HR, Recruiting, or outsource to some placement firms. All groups here need to grow. It’s everyone’s job to bring on the best people we can possibly attract to our team.

I took on a fun internal project here in the Seattle Skytap office, interviewing my colleagues at all levels and departments of the business, to add to our new Careers@Skytap page and other job sites with a video that provides potential candidates an authentic feel for what it’s like to work here and why they are here. From the 3 hours or so of content I captured from 25 employees, the results were quite interesting.

First, I split the edits down to two 10-minute reels: One for technical/engineering roles, and one for “business side” roles like sales, marketing, operations, etc, as you would expect individuals seeking these roles to have very different interests.

One really cool observation you can’t miss watching these is consistency of everyone’s passion for Skytap technology itself, and the constraints it takes away for customers. Our developers, QA/QE staff, IT Ops teams – they literally geek out on how fast a complex provisioning process gets done, because they all know how difficult this part of the job was at previous employers, and how much behind-the-scenes technical expertise went into Skytap to make it all look so easy.

On the business side there is also a huge amount of passion for the technology because we see how easy it is to demonstrate the value of Skytap when selling it, how much value it creates once adopted, and how well Skytap’s entire product delivery arm and support team deliver on customer value, so these customers stay on and grow with us.

Right now, the market sector of cloud software and services is extremely hot. Demand for highly skilled engineers and experienced business talent in the cloud space is high, and competition for candidates is fierce. In all of this, we need to never lose sight of making sure we get the right fit for our team and to compliment our team when hiring. While having a huge list of skills, experience in software, awards, etc. looks great on paper, and may garner an immediate job offer at some larger firms, those qualifications are just the ante for entering the game to us.

When asked “who we are looking for” everyone seemed incredibly aligned in their answers. Yes, we need to grow fast, but we are still small enough that every new person we hire will need to pull with us, and bring not just their skills, but the intangibles we want in our future co-workers, so this remains a great place to work. Things like enthusiasm, inventiveness, adaptability, teamwork and even just “fun.”

Turns out, you can’t fake a passion for this business.

Are you passionate about transforming the software lifecycle? Know someone else who might be a fit here? Start on our Careers @ Skytap page and check out the current positions we are hiring for, both here in Seattle and in the field.